If you ask 10 people about incredible invention ideas that they’ve had over the course of their life, there is a fair chance that at least one of them would say, “wireless headphones.” There have been a number of different iterations (https://www.cnet.com/news/11-alternative-wireless-earbud-headphones-that-arent-the-apple-airpods/) of wireless headphones in the last couple of years; however, with Apple’s December 2016 release of wireless AirPods and the accompanying lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack on the new iPhone 7, the global Apple addiction is likely going to help along our relationship with these little marvels.

Sound

Since we’re talking about earbud style headphones, it makes sense to begin with sound. The AirPods boast fantastic sound quality and although they do not perform at quite the same level as some of their top-tier wired counterparts, the differences are imperceptible to all but the most discerning. I may even go so far as to say that these are the best Bluetooth headphones I’ve found yet. If you have the power to listen to Metallica on maximum output and simultaneously retain the detail to get your pops off with Prokokiev in the reading room, you are bound to enjoy AirPods. If you need something relative to compare the sound quality to, take the standard Apple EarBuds and multiply the sound quality by about 1.5.

With that out of the way, let’s discuss the experience you get from the AirPods. They come in a contemporary case that also serves as a charger and follow a similar aesthetic to the EarPods you would have received when purchasing an older iPhone model – minus the chord. While you may be thinking that there is no way that these will stay in your ear by themselves, anecdotal evidence from runners and office workers alike suggest that they do stay put quite nicely, though they may not necessarily feel as snug as an earphone with a silicon insert might. The risk of loss for these headphones certainly does exist, but lay more in the realm of, “I set them down and one fell into a couch cushion, never to be seen or heard from again.” The case/charger is supposed to help with this since they’re of no use dead. Lastly, say what you will about it, there is a strap (https://www.spigen.com/products/airpod-strap?variant=27600250113) available for the loss averse user.

Battery

For such a small package, one wouldn’t expect the battery to worth its weight in salt, or Potash for us Saskatchewan folk. If you are inclined to listen music at high levels for extended periods of time, you would be right. On the other hand, if you listen at “safe” levels, Apple’s claim of five hours of operating time per charge is accurate. On top of that, once fully charged, the Lightning port equipped case has the capacity to charge the AirPods over four times, with each charge taking about 15 minutes.

Functionality (The Meat and Potatoes)

The AirPods, like all of Apples other integrated tech, do not disappoint when it comes to connectivity. Open the AirPods case next to your phone and pair using your phone. Presto. In-ear = connected, out-of-ear = disconnected, take one AirPod out = pause.

Beware if you’re not a fan of Siri. While you will be miles ahead of the guy at the airport having a 10-minute conversation with his iPhone on speaker, the AirPods are still heavily reliant on Siri to change tracks, adjust volume, etc. It’s incredibly useful to be able to tap your ear twice and dial a phone call, though you can still control everything from your phone if Siri is not your cup of tea.

Some of the most exciting features involve what you can do with the AirPods. They can be paired with iPhones, Apple Watches, iPads, Macs/Macbooks, Apple TV, and even with Android, Windows, and other devices. Apple may be renowned for closed systems, but it is nice that they didn’t extend this ideology to their headphones.

Sound and microphone are likely the best wireless set on the market, considering the microphone is in the earpiece.

With the case on hand, you may be able to get through 24 hours between case charges.

Pairing is a breeze with iPhones and similarly easy with other devices.

A relatively snug fit with no wire to be concerned about, keep an eye out for subsequent releases with silicon inserts for improved fit.

Cons:

Price point is on par with Apple products, but you do get what you pay for as usual.

Your relationship with Siri must be developed to use AirPods without additional input from your device. In-line controllers for wired headphones have done a great job of providing unobtrusive control on the go.

High potential for loss, however that can be said for all wireless headphones.

No noise cancelling technology for playback.

Final Thoughts

If you are committed to the Apple aesthetic and have the coin to spare, the AirPods will give you a better experience in terms of sound, connectivity, and convenience than any of its counterparts, Apple or otherwise. If you are leery about Siri, prone to loss, or looking for an option with noise cancelling features, it may be in your best interest to evaluate other options.

Do you know how many apps store your personal information?! Do you know how many apps share your information to advertisers? Do you know how many apps connect to third party websites and share data about you and your daily life?Read more

Do you have range anxiety?

You’ve likely suffered from range anxiety if you own an electric car and wonder if you have enough battery power to reach your destination!

The greatest fear of an electric car driver is traveling too far from home and running out of juice. Batteries in these cars have progressively got better and better but you still can’t go on a long road trip in your Tesla Model S. Until now! When you think you’re about to run out of battery power, your tires will end up powering your car.

Smart technology of the future will use energy that is wasted in the process and convert it into working energy. This is the concept behind what Goodyear unveiled at the Geneva Auto show. The energy released in your tires heating up on the road can now be used to charge the battery in your Prius. The more energy efficient our cars are, the better for everyone in our world. This could be a starting point for many different technologies that could use wasted energy.

It may be some time before that technology hits the cold streets of Regina but what a brilliant way to reuse some energy that is currently being wasted on every tire of every vehicle on the road!

At SXSW this year, the app enthusiasts finally had something to rave about. Introducing the first breakthrough app to be revealed to a large audience at South by Southwest since Foursquare – everyone, meet Meerkat.

Meerkat is an app the allows the user to use the camera in a smart phone as a live web cam. When you activate Meerkat, it lets your followers on Twitter know you’re live streaming video. When you end the streaming or close the app, the videos is gone. It’s not saved or stored or kept on file, just streams your video, like a window into your world.

This, for obvious reason, got a lot of people in the tech industry excited. Launching at the infamous SXSW conference was a smart way to get the initial 100,000 downloads. Everyone was downloading Meerkat. Well that was until Twitter found out. Twitter didn’t like this much. After all, Meerkat was using networks people had already established on Twitter to broadcast to. Smart strategy really, until Twitter doesn’t want you using their network anymore.

What we found out after SXSW is that a couple months prior, Twitter acquired a company that does something peculiarly similar. Periscope, an app that offers similar features to Meerkat but is owned by Twitter.

And the Twitterrati were shut down.

It didn’t take long for Twitter to notify the owners of Meerkat that they will no longer have access to the Twitter Social Graph (where Twitter tracks who follows who), basically making Twitter useless to Meerkat. But a defensive move against an opponent signals a sign of assumed weakness. Is Twitter worried that Meerkat already has the marketshare of mobile streaming?

Enter Periscope. Twitter’s live streaming app and Meerkat competitor. They look remarkably similar but the edge has to go to Periscope as it has more features and is backed by Twitter’s already massive network. Periscope seems like the App with more options for what you want to do with live streaming but there is certainly something to be said about going to market first. Meerkat has much more momentum coming off a great launch at SXSW.

It may not be whether or not Meerkat is going to beat out Periscope or vice versa, the question we are asking, are live streaming apps here to stay? What other applications do live streaming apps have other than festivals, shows, vacations, or entertainment?

Want to join our e-mail Newsletter?

1. Apple sold 411,000 iPhones per day in 2013. That’s right, 150 million iPhones were sold in the year making an astounding 411,000 on average sold per day. If you really want to get technical, Apple sold 17,123 iPhones per hour in 2013 or 258 iPhones sold on average per minute. That is a lot of iPhones.

2. Apple now has a mind-boggling $178,000,000,000 in cash. With that they could buy Twitter, Box, Pandora, LinkedIn, Yahoo, AOL, Groupon, Zynga, Shutterfly, Yelp & GoPro, with $48B in cash left over. Really puts it into perspective when you compare to other companies in the technology sector. OR if you don’t want to compare to some of the tech giants, with that kind of money they could buy Ford, GM, and Tesla and still have $41.3 billion left over. Either way, Apple as a lot of cash.

3. If Apple distributed its cash to the 320 million Americans, each person would receive $556. Want to kickstart the economy? Try giving away all of your cash on hand! You may be out of business but you’re going to make millions of Americans prosper…..or have one crazy $556 dollar night out or purchase $556 hotdogs at Costco.

I’d vote for the Costco option, everyone likes Costco hotdogs.

4. One day late in January 2015 overnight Apple’s market capitalization grew by 58 billon dollars. To put $58,000,000,000 in context, Ford is worth $56,660,000,000. Upon hearing the company beat quarterly earnings, Apple in one night gained $58 billion in market capitalization. Market Capitalization is based on a companies share price multiplied by the amount of shares outstanding. If your investors think your company should be valued at more than it is, generally your stock price will improve. You could say that investors are quite happy with how Apple has been doing.

5. Apple earns US$300,000 per minute. Selling 258 phones per minute it makes sense that Apple makes $300,000 per minutes. Sometimes you sit back in awe of what this tech giant has done.

6. Everything you say to Siri is sent to Apple, analyzed and stored. To quote Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility”, just because you can ask Siri anything you want, doesn’t mean you should ask Siri anything you want. Some things are better left not talked about.

Privacy in this post-internet world will constantly be under attack as more and more companies and brands want better data on their customers. Companies that don’t thoroughly understand what customer information is being used for can come under scrutiny in the future as data leaks, and hacks become more and more main stream. Don’t let this happen to you, understand what information you’re keeping as well as ‘why’ you’re keeping it. And no “because we want to sell it in the future” is not a viable option.

7. Every Apple iPhone ad displays the time as 9:41 AM, the time Steve Jobs unveiled it in 2007. You’re probably opening a new tab and looking up every iPhone ad since 2007. Everything to Steve Jobs had meaning, even the minute details, that’s what made his designs so different. So it’s to no surprise that the time displayed on the phone has to have a meaning.

8. In Japan’s Apple Store, there was a fan who started waiting in line 7 months early for iPhone 6. Can you believe that? I mean Snapchat is pretty revolutionary but waiting in line for 7 months for a device that slightly marginally better than the iPhone 5?!

9. 60% of apps in the Apple App Store have never been downloaded. Does it surprise you? How many people have you heard say, “do I have just the best idea for an app that’s going to be worth billions” then they go on to ramble off about some made up problem they think people have and how their revolutionary app is going to solve it. 60% makes sense. The fact that it’s not that difficult to build an app anymore and as it gets easier more and more useless apps are created.

But you know what they say, if you want to create a remarkable app, one that really gets talked about, create lots and lots of apps. Eventually you’ll get you one.

10. Apple’s net income last quarter was $18 billion, the largest quarterly earnings for any company ever. Now they’re just trying to break records. I mean c’mon, best quarter earnings ever?! Think about all the amazing organizations that have had large profits, majority marketshare, ever increasing growth curves and none of them compare to how Apple did in the 4th quarter of their 2014.

11. Apple CEO Tim Cook is the first and currently only openly gay person in the Fortune 500. After what happened at the Olympics in 2014 there has been a worldwide increase in support for all different lifestyles. It’s pretty cool Tim Cook is one of those leaders who will help our world be more accepting of peoples differences.

Hello Moto Xiaomi. Welcome the world’s third largest smartphone maker. A once small startup, now Xiaomi employs 5,000 people in mainland China, Singapore and Malaysia. They began operations in 2010, sold their first phone in 2011, and in 2014, three short years later, they sold over 60 million phones.

Our entire world has gone mobile. I teach a class at Sask Poly Technic in Regina and every year for the past three years I’ve polled the class as to how many people have smart phones. Every year usually only one person doesn’t have a smart phone (but ironically enough they are always quit to whip out their flip phone circa 2003). No wonder this young startup in China has grown exponentially over the past half decade. They’re making something that (almost) everyone in the developed and undeveloped world use every day; a smart phone.

The plot twist of this story is that Xiaomi has no plans of coming into North America any time soon. At one time a hot bed for the latest and greatest technology is now on a list of countries tech giants may or my not enter. The times are sure changing. A sign that North America may, in fact, not be the centre of the Universe, these growing third world countries are maturing into global business powerhouses. If North America doesn’t pick up it’s digital socks and start developing the worlds bleeding edge technology, it won’t be only the third most popular phone that’ll be coming out of China but everything else we use in our daily lives.

Want to buy the greatest present ever for the tech-lover in your family? Welcome the OM/ONE, the worlds first levitating speaker. All the kids around the water cooler will be talking about your one-of-a-kind levitating speaker. Yes, you read correctly – this speaker levitates, floats, hovers, flies around in one place and will become the center piece at your next party.

Are you ready for a sound grenade? This bad boy will transform any boring room into an experience equal to a front seat at the Regina Symphony Orchestra. You don’t have to compromise sound when you use a Bluetooth speaker, the levitating wonder packs a sound punch when it comes to filling up a room with your favourite Nickelback album.

Check out the video below. The guy that came up with it is like the god of sound.

Here at the KSP Technology office, we are always looking for cool technology. Expected date of awesomeness: March/Apr 2015!

Oculus Rift is a new virtual reality company pushing the boundaries of what is capable with 3D and virtual reality. It’s a head mounted display that provides a large field of view. 110 degrees of view to be exact. This means that when playing a video game you no longer look at a screen but are encapsulated by the game. This has the potential to change the way we administer virtual reality training in flight simulators for pilots, situation simulators for the army, medical procedures for doctors, and training simulators for many service based industries.

The possibilities are endless.

Industries that Oculus will be creating a Rift in:

Healthcare: doctors can perform surgery virtually to practice and to do surgery in remote areas where doctors can’t traditionally get to.

Gaming: this is the obvious one. Imagine Mario Cart in a virtual reality simulator!?

Agriculture: teach kids how to plant seeds, tend to the garden, take care of plants and learn everything there’s is to know about agriculture in a virtual world.

Aviation: it’s now cost effective to help future pilots learn to fly and re-educate current pilots on new features of new airliners. (Those that know Kevin know that he will be first in line at the Regina Flying Club!)

Geography: what if you could explore remote locations of our planet from the comfort of your home?

The workplace: how about having a board meeting with everyone in attendance? You could be in your lounge pants on your couch at home participating in the biggest meeting of the year, while still caring for your sick kid.

Education: instead of going on a field trip every day (because wouldn’t that be awesome?) you can now have the class join you to discover Iceland while physically never leaving the classroom.

The possibilities are endless. What industry do YOU think Oculus Rift is going to change? How could Oculus Rift change the way you do things in your company?

The Consumer Electronics Show is one of the coolest times of the year! Many of our favourite tech giants (think Samsung and Apple) always unveil their latest ground-breaking gadgets, while newer entrants to the tech scene try to make a splash.

This year had hundreds upon hundreds of cool, weird, and amazing new tech gadgets were shown, but what really stood out to us were the gadgets that are trying to make our homes “smarter” and more connected. Things like the Nest thermostat, which most of us have probably heard of by this point, and a coffee pot you control with your phone.

We decided to compile our top 4 favourite Smart-Home Gadgets of CES 2015.

Welcome to the future.

1. The August Connect

The August Connect builds on August’s already great SmartLock. “How?”, you might ask. The August Connect plugs into an outlet near the SmartLock to provide the lock with a WiFi signal. With the lock connected to the internet, you can check on the status of your lock at anytime, from anywhere, or even unlock the door for the cable guy while you’re on vacation. Very cool!

2. The Ring to Rule Them All

Excuse our Lord of The Rings reference. It had to be done. This has to be one of the coolest high-tech gadgets we stumbled upon. Essentially, you can control many different devices in your home, all with the gesture of your finger. Check out the video above to see what we mean.

3. Brewing Beer in your Kitchen?

Now this one may not make your home “smarter”, but it will definitely make your parties have a little extra pizazz! The PicoBrew Zymatic is a relatively small home brewing system that can brew around 3 gallons of fresh beer for you in about 4 hours. It can be controlled via a connected smartphone with its WiFi capabilities. It can even access 100s of recipes in PicoBrew’s cloud-hosted library. Cheers to that!

4. Lightbulbs That Stop Intruders?

Last but not least, the Sengled Snap lightbulb. This one takes the cake. Not only does this lightbulb have WiFi capabilities, and the ability to do such things as turn on your stereo system, but it has facial recognition capabilities. That’s right; facial recognition. This lightbulb has a built in security camera that can record video and a microphone that can pick up any sounds. Home security just got a lot brighter!

Most phones come with a factory “bright” setting. Go into your settings and play around with the brightness tab. Some phones have an auto brightness feature where your phone can react to the sunlight or no light and adjust accordingly. These types of features save your battery life.

2. Set your screen timeout to 15 or 20 seconds.

The longer your screen remains lit during your day to day activities the more battery life it uses. The default setting on most phones is 1 minute. You may not think about it but the timeout period of your screen affects your battery life as you’re on and off your phone periodically through out the day. The more you use your phone the more the “timeout” period matters.

3. Turn off Wifi, Bluetooth, and location services.

Location based services arguably shouldn’t come from the factory set to “on”. Apple got in a little heat over this very issue when documents leaked that every iPhone tracks the location of the phone whether you like it or not. Might be a good idea to turn off location-based services for now, possibly for ever. Sure you won’t be much of a hit on Friends Finder (or Creep-a-Friend as we call it) but hey, was the stalking all of your friends all it was cracked up to be?

Bluetooth is also an easy one. Keep it off unless you’re driving and expecting a call. Otherwise, what the heck are you trying to connect to via Bluetooth?!

Lastly, Wifi. Wifi is a tough one because you want to use it much more than Mobile Data, the signal stronger, the internets faster, you can get more done, but at what cost? The life of your battery that what costs! If you’re trying to conserve your battery life you may want to go sans Wifi.

4. Download an app that helps preserve battery life.

I’ve used Juice Defender (on Android, sorry Apple Fans) for over a year now. It gives you several different options as to how much battery juice you want defend. I usually have it set to “Casual” but if you wanted to conserve more power, I’d suggest a setting of “aggressive” or “extreme”.

An app like this knows more about your phone you do. It finds where your phone is putting in too much work and throttles it back, saving your battery those precious percentages when you really need it.

5. Take a look see as to what’s using the most power.

On most smart phones in the settings application, you can find the battery and what is using the most power on your phone. Maybe it’s an app you rarely use, maybe it’s an app you’ve been meaning to delete (ehem, Facebook). Either way find the apps that are sucking the most power and uninstall, uninstall, UNINSTALL!